When Google acquired SketchUp in 2006, they announced a competition for college students across the nation to model their campus in 3D using SketchUp, and then to geolocate the buildings in Google Earth. Seven winning teams would then be invited to a three day SketchUp seminar at Google Headquarters in Palo Alto and their models added to the official buildings layer in the Google Earth database. In a span of about 2 months, I helped lead a team of 10 individuals who collectively took over 2000 photographs and modeled over 130 buildings. On the day of the submission deadline, we submitted a complete model of the entire Dartmouth campus. A month later, among 350 teams, we were announced as one of the winners.
Here are some of the buildings I created in SketchUp:
This was an important project for me, mostly because of the friends that I made, but also because it was one of several things that got me into digital arts.